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Organizing Tips

If you haven't used most items in 2 years, sell, donate or give them away.

The average office worker makes 61 trips per week to the fax machine, copier and printer.

Make the easy decisions first and begin discarding the obvious items you want to get rid of.

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Organization Revisited

By Nicole Villalpando - Austin American-StatesmanSeptember 3rd 2016

Marie Kondo writes in her best-seller “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” that tidying up is “a special event, not a daily chore.” She espouses that once you tidy up your whole house, you won’t have to constantly tidy up, you’ll just have to put things back where they belong.

Marie Kondo does not live with my family. We are constantly having to tidy up, to sort through the mounds of stuff coming in, most of which needs to go out again.

Last year as part of the Your Home series, I interviewed experts on garage, closet and pantry organization and took on these projects at my house. For one day, these spaces looked like what you see in a magazine. And then life happened.

Now, a year later, I reassessed these spaces and rolled up my sleeves to get organized again. “People think that you get organized and you’re done,” says Deniece Schofield, author of “Confessions of an Organized Homemaker: The Secrets of Uncluttering Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life.” “Somebody has to keep it organized.”

While we might want to nag and scream when the family doesn’t follow the system, the reality is someone has to take ownership of keeping the organization system working. And that someone is usually the person who created the system, the one for whom it matters most.

Many organizers use acronyms to describe the process of organizing your stuff. Austinite Lorie Marrero, who created Clutter Diet, a home organization online subscription service, uses ORDER:

Outline your plan by assessing how you use the space and how you want to use the space.

Review your items deciding what goes and what stays.

Decide where things belong.

Establish a home for everything and routine to get it put back there.

Revisit your system to reassess your space and make tweaks where you need it.

Marrero says people fail most often at the first step by not outlining the plan before starting and at the last step by not revisiting the site to rework it.

When things don’t go well, people often will ditch their current system and go looking for another system, another product or another magic bullet to solve their problem, says Barry Izsak, certified professional organizer and owner of Arranging It All in Austin, Texas. He reminds that “the best organizing system in the world isn’t going to last if you don’t stick to it.”

The easiest way to stick with it is to have a system that everyone in the house understands. An easy system will make people more likely to put things back the first time.

Catch yourself when you think “I’ll just put it there for now and I’ll put it away later,” Izsak says. We all know that later often doesn’t happen.

Ideally you can then spend five to 15 minutes a day just running through the house and putting anything out of place back. Or, when you see something out of place, move it to the right place right away. “When you do a quick pickup, you don’t give it the opportunity to pile up,” says Leslie Byer Rosner, a professional organizer with Found Space Organizing.

But if you have let it pile up, it’s time to start over, maybe not from scratch entirely this time.

Some key tips from our experts to make the pileup less likely to happen:

Don’t fight nature. If kids naturally leave the scissors in one spot on the counter, maybe that’s where the scissors should live.

Find your roadblocks. If there is an item that is never put back where you think it should go or if there is a space that gets junked up first, create a new plan for that item or that space.

Containerize like items in clear containers. They will be easy to see.

Lose the lids. You want putting things away to be a one-handed, one-step process.

Use open shelving systems rather than drawers when you can. It skips the step of opening the drawer, and you can see what’s there.

Opt for hooks rather than hangers for items like jackets and robes that are hung up daily.

Label everything. You can use something as simple as masking tape and markers, but often family members respect the label more when it is either preprinted or made with a label maker.

Explain the system to everyone who lives there. Make sure the labels make sense to them and they understand what you mean.

Create a space for temporary projects or items. Maybe it’s a bin to contain the science fair project while kids are working on it or a container for an in-progress craft project.

Create a bin for items that you want to donate or have a garage sale with. Then, when you see something you don’t use, you have a place to put it away from the stuff you do use.

Turn clothes hangers the opposite direction once a year. You’ll be able to see if you wear certain clothes or not.

Be flexible. Life changes and your system has to be adaptable to create more space for the workout clothes that you’re now going to use or more dog toys for the new puppy.

Know where items are going to go before bringing them into the house. Impulse shopping can be dangerous.

Above all, Keep It Simple, Stupid. The system cannot be difficult to understand or require too many steps.

Give yourself the motivation to stick with it. Keep a list of things you’d like to do with your newfound extra time and do them.

The Arranging it AllSM team is mentored and trained by a Certified Professional Organizer.